Sword and Sorcery & Epic/High Fantasy

So I'm finishing up the Fantasy presentation for the Minnesota Library Association conference, and I've had a devil of a time figuring out how to define Sword and Sorcery (S&S) and Epic/High fantasy.  Where are the dividing lines?  Do I want to include tropes for Heroic and Quest? Is there enough meaningful difference? All these are important fantasy elements, but it's not easy figuring out how to talk about them coherently and meaningfully to folks who are not very well-acquainted with them.

With the help of the resources I've consulted, I've decided to treat S&S and Epic/High as tropes, and Heroic and Quest as elements that can appear in many different tropes.  That seems meaningful to me, and should make them fairly explainable.  This has been one of the hardest things about this entire presentation, frankly. 

Age of Fantasy

In the chapter on awards, A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, published in 1982, makes the point that fantasy, "as a viable genre," is still pretty young.  The earliest award they have listed is the August Derleth Fantasy Award (in 1976 renamed the British Fantasy Awards) which began in 1972. The Gandalf Award, a "Grand Master" award awarded in conjunction with the Hugo, goes back to 1974.  The first World Fantasy Award was given at the first World Fantasy Convention in 1975.

The oldest SF award is the Hugo from 1955. WorldCon, aka the World Science Fiction Convention, awarder of the Hugo, was first thrown by the World Science Fiction Society in 1939. 

Of course fantasy's actually been around as long as there's been literature.   I wonder if it's this dichotomy that makes it so hard for a lot of people to understand?

How to describe the appeal of Fantasy

I'm looking for a word to describe the appeal of Fantasy.  I want to try to avoid any words that directly correlate to magic, as there are definitely fantasies that don't use magic, but it's difficult.  The non-literally-magical meanings of enchantment work very well, but again, there's a fairly strong correlation to magic.

I found this in "The Outlandish Companion" by Diana Gabaldon, which is a companion volume to her Outlander series.

"The processes of the body are both intensely personal and highly cryptic, which gives us the sense of significance and mystery that we call "magic."  This same mixture of significance and mystery underlies religious feeling and is it no coincidence that most healers in primitive societies are also priests. Religion and science lie at opposite ends of the spectrum of rationality, with medicine balanced somewhere in the middle. The important thing to note is that it is a spectrum; ergo, the elements of it are all connected, even though the extremities may seem so different as to bear no relation to each other."

Claire, one of the main characters in the "Outlander" series, is a healer.  She's a surgeon in the 20th century, and something a bit less sophisticated in the 18th.  So how magic is viewed is very important to the series.  (Gabaldon is serious about her research and her accuracy.  I highly recommend her books.)

It seems to me that the bit about significance and mystery might be very helpful in my search for a way to talk about Fantasy.  Also perhaps important when discussing SF & Fantasy.

"The Man on the Ceiling" by Steve and Melanie Tem

Just started "The Man on the Ceiling" by Steve and Melanie Tem and so far I want to donate to every children's charity I've ever run across.  "Sometimes I wonder if we will be judged on how we've cared for all our unwanted children and it makes me shudder." (P.14)  Indeed. 

Very interesting ideas about imagination and reality, and I can already tell the storytelling is going to be amazing.  I'm also liking what they have to say about created families being created out of faith and imagination, not blood.  I'm from a blended family, and that is so true. 

Adding Sarah Monette (the last author to leave me actively angry I had to put my book down and go back to work after lunch) and P.C. Hodgell (for whom I waited through a 20 year(?) hiatus for the rest of the story) to my list of books for my talk.  Ooh! Ooh! And Lois McMaster Bujold!

Rationality and Fantasy

From the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, p.3:

"It is in the seventeenth century that we can find the first critical awareness of the separate existence of a genre of 'fantasy'[.]"

You need an intentionally rationalist mindset - like that that came in with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment - to separate the fantastic out in literature.

Fantasy as reality?

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a really interesting example of the problem of perception in fantasy.  It's a retelling of the myth of Achilles, from his boyhood to his fate in The Illiad, and is told as a faithful, realistic story, as it might have been told by an ancient Greek with access to modern storytelling methods.  So it includes all the elements of Greek religion, which are now considered Greek myth; most importantly to this story, the gods are very present, and the belief that they can effect everything that happens to humans, if they care to, is absolute. All this is handled in a very matter-of-fact, concrete manner.

This is an example of one person's religion being another person's fantasy.  What was very real and evident to the Greeks, supernatural beings needing to be worshiped, feared, and appeased, is to us nothing but a primitive society's way of explaining things that we feel either have or need no explanation, or that can be explained by science.  So what's fantasy to us was deadly reality to them, and this is one of the aspects that makes fantasy such an interesting genre, and so potentially tricky.  Because sometimes the alternate life of these elements we see as fantasy is not in the distant past, but here in the present, living cheek by jowl with the majority hard-headed view of reality in the modern West. And who's to say what's ultimately the truth?

"Maisie Dobbs" by Jacqueline Winspear

Just finished Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear.  I’m really impressed. Even though it’s a mystery, the mystery is almost incidental to the story.  It’s much more about Maisie’s story, World War I and its effects on everybody, and just people being who they are as best they can and getting on with their daily lives in a loving manner. 

I loved the main character Maisie Dobbs.  Hooray for strong female characters! She embodies many of the changes happening in England in that time period. Moving from service to well-educated, middle-class, respected business owner. Healing from grievous wounds. Forging a new identity for herself after a traumatic experience made her rethink who she was.  She does all this without losing her compassion and humanity. She’s independent, strong-minded, and not cooing over babies from page 1.  She’s her own person, and a role-model.

The emotional story is really vivid and well told.  The love story, the emotional component of Maisie's journey through society, the effects of war, the sense of the characters constantly growing and changing are all unmistakable and interwoven, but not maudlin.  Winspear allows you to take in as much of the emotional landscape as you can or want, and at your own pace; she doesn’t push it at you.  The subtleties make it that much more effective and realistic, as I find that my emotions often sneak up on me and it takes me a while to figure out what exactly is going on in my heart. But they pack a punch. I was crying at the end of the book, at the final reveal. 

Her plotting is subtle. There are a number of things going on at any one time, and Winspear manages a number of reveals throughout the book that keep it fresh.  The story also takes some unexpected turns that keep you guessing.  Her characterization is such that even when a character is off-page, you wonder what’s happening to her and how the current events are going to effect her.  

I really liked the theme of World War I.  This is a war that Americans don’t talk about much, although there’s more seen now because of the upcoming 100 year anniversary of the beginning in a couple of years.  Winspear’s obviously done her research, based on my, admittedly, sketchy knowledge of the time period, and I reveled in the historical detail and her wonderful ability to evoke a time period. 

I also really liked the metaphysical and human aspects of the novel.  The metaphysical is nothing overwhelming, but the stress on the importance of meditation for problem solving and living deliberately, the importance of spiritual development, the emphasis placed on empathy were healing. I loved the insistence that we’re all connected and we all have a responsibility to help our fellows as much as we can while allowing each other space and dignity to be who we are and help ourselves as we need to.  There’s also an almost complete lack of judgment, an insistence that that sometimes we’re overtaken by forces we can’t control and we need help that we may or may not receive. You don’t read many novels with this level of intentional humaneness; Winspeare is conveying an admirable way of being as much as a very entertaining story.